Here’s another experiment along the same lines as the last one, with the same mouse controls.
This time it’s 15,625 Pixel3D points, and the position in the cube defines the colour.
I really like the moirre effect.
Archive for the 'actionscript' Category
Recently I’ve been inspired to create some experimental things in Papervision. I think that it’s mainly down to Matt’s talk on generative art at FlashBrighton a few weeks back.
Well, here’s the first. in brief:
- Plot 9902 Pixel3D points evenly around the surface of a sphere
- Colour each one a random red
- Rotate the sphere depending on where the mouse is
- Apply a blur effect to a BitmapEffectLayer
- Change the clippingPoint
I kinda liked the effect, so here we go. Hold the mouse down to push the sphere away.
A quick update to say that we’re up for some more awards!
First of all, Bow Street Runner is up for a BIMA award on the 27th Novemeber.
Secondly, Bow Street Runner is up for a DIMA award on the 27th November, along with the excellent Transformers auditions we made for Paramount.
It’s absolutely fantastic to see BSR up for more awards. It was a lot of hard work, and I’d like to think that it really has paid off.
If you’ve not played BSR, it’s a free online game for Channel 4 that was launched earlier this year. It could easily take over an hour or more to complete all 5 episodes, so if you fancy a little taster video to see what it’s all about, take a look at the video here.
I’ve blogged about Bow Street Runner a few times.
Red5. The promise is: “an Open Source Flash Server written in Java” with support for pretty much everything most people would need. According to Chris Allen’s session I went to at Flash on the Beach, it would be easy enough to get it set up and running.
Well, that’s not quite my experience with Red5 so far. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be a central resource for information. There’s the following – i’m not sure which are official:
- http://code.google.com/p/red5/
- http://osflash.org/red5/
- http://wiki.red5.org
- http://www.red5tutorials.net (spam seems to have crept in)
- http://red5.org/ (appears to be down)
- http://red5world.com/ (last updated July 08)
- Also, I was unable to download the Eclipse plugin from here: http://www.red5.org/projects/red5plugin/
I also couldn’t find any examples using AS3, which was a little suprising. I see that’s planned for version 0.9.
After downlaoding the most recent release (0.8RC1), I spent several hours attempting to get it up and running on my XP box to no avail. I then tried installing 0.7, which I finally managed to get running.
One of the many problems I had was finding out how to log into the admin panel. I read that the username and password was admin/admin – however that wasn’t working. It took a lot of scouring mailing lists to find that you need to register a new user first at this URL:
http://localhost:5080/admin/register.html – you’ll then need to restart the Red5 server. I’ve yet to see that mentioned in any tutorial or documentation… although I may well be wrong 
ANT has also been a real pain to set up. The readme for Red5 says to get this installed, and to run “ant server” – after a few hours of battling with this and having a lot of problems with dependencies and environment variables, I finally settled with just running ’start.bat’ from the Start menu. It seems to work, although i’m confused why the instruction to run ant exists.
I won’t even begin to list the problems i’ve had attempting to create a simple ‘hello world’ application. This is no doubt due to my complete lack of experience with Java, but it’s a real shame there’s a lack of well written, up-to-date tutorials on how to get a simple application up and running.
In the end, I’ve managed to create my own Flash app that connects to one of the existing sample Java apps, but it’s far from ideal. At least i’ve got something to show for my efforts though.
It turns out I could have saved a lot of time by reading Robert Silverton’s blog, where he details pretty much exactly what i’ve gone through. Doh!
A short message to the Red5 developers: You’ve created something that is no doubt absolutely wonderful. There needs to be a little more documentation and tutorials. Please try and help more of us get involved with using it. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please let me know.
I’ve just had some great news. The Bow Street Runner Flash game that I worked on for Channel 4 earlier this year at Littleloud has been nominated for a Children’s BAFTA!
The competition is pretty tough, but, well, fingers crossed eh!
Update: We won!
HOORAY!
I’m very happy to say that the epic Bow Street Runner game we made for Channel 4 has just won a Flashforward award at Flashforward San Francisco 2008
Thanks to everyone involved!
Edit: This is our second Flashforward award
I managed to resist the last iPhone, but this time i’m not too sure i’ll be able. What’s different this time? The combination of 3G, GPS, and an accelerometer. This could seriously be the start of a new – maybe even revolutionary – gaming platform.
Location-aware gaming might take off now. I’m thinking that companies that are already doing similar things (like Locomatrix) might see a lot more interest in the coming months. Perhaps a mix between GPS gaming and PMOG (Passively Multiplayer Online Game) could be interesting? I’ve got to get one of these and start experimenting..
Of course, the combination of 3G, GPS, and accelerometer has been done before in a few phones, including the excellent N95, but -assuming the GPS works on the iPhone 2.0 – there’s one huge difference here: The ludicrous fanboy factor. Any interesting apps and games for the iPhone are going to be lapped up by a very vocal, very active, very influential fanbase.
Will we see Flash on this? With Adobe’s Open Screen Project, I can only hope Talking of wishful thinking, perhaps Apple will drop the walled garden approach. I seriously doubt it though..
[Update] I see Mashable gets what i’m talking about.
The Alternativa3D engine has been launched! The demos on the site are astounding. While Papervision 3D is excellent, these guys really seem to have set the bar in visual terms. I think that competition can only be a good thing, eh guys?
I can’t wait to try this engine out, it looks really promising.
Respect to the Russians!
[via drawlogic]
[edit: Simon, a colleague and games journalist writes about this too at ChewingPixels.]
In my second little project today, I modified the circuit I built for the Flash etch-a-sketch, by adding another potentiometer and 3 LEDs, each of which represents the voltage of each pot (using pulse-width modulation to ‘dim’ the LED).
Each pot is responsible for either the pitch, yaw, or roll of a cube in PV3D.
Simple stuff that’s been done before! I think I need to think of something a bit more interesting now 
Well, I had nothing much better to do today, so after sorting out my previous problems with Arduino and Flash, I thought i’d connect 2 potentiometers to the Arduino board, and make….. Yezzer-sketch!
Here’s the on-screen result:
The very simple circuit:
Video:
I need to get some better potentiometers, these are pretty rubbish.
Yey for making … stuff!
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